[Sderby] Desktops

[Richard Smedley]

On Saturday 14 October 2006 18:11, Steve Tickle wrote:
> Now I don't want to start a Holy War but what's the Desktop of
> Preference of the people on here?

We tend to give most of our clients GNOME, as everyone finds
it straightforwars, although one of my colleagues did give out
a lot of laptops running KDE, along with a couple of hours
of training, and has had no reports of problems.
Obviously running the desktops on a stable Debian-based
GNU/Linux distro makes a difference here ;-)

> My previous experience has been of KDE but I'm just in the process of
> knocking up a Debian based machine here and I'm thinking of dipping my
> to in the water with GNOME.

You should try /everything/
When KDE 1 appeared I tried it on a 486 with 12MB of RAM - painful -
but I later tried it at work on a newer machine and couldn't quite see
the point of exchanging all that screen space in return for functionality
that I didn't need. I stuck with WindowMaker when I needed to
run a GUI, and continued for sometime to use it to introduce new
computer users [ie new to computers, not just to GNU], as it's very
intuitive when tied to Debian's menu system.
However I found using mice less easy over time and tried Ion and
ratpoison, eventually settling upon PWM [the oriignal, not the LUA-scripted 
PWM2 hack to Ion2] as offering the ideal balance of power, speed and
functionality for me.

The main point is that you won't find what suits you best without living
with it for a few days. We've been using Ubuntu on clients' laptops
lately and XFCe, GNOME & KDE are all installable from a single package.
WindowMaker, Fluxbox, E16 and PWM, as well as a couple of dozen others,
are all also easily installable, as they are in regular Debian flavours.

Perhaps you should start with one of the lighter weight window managers,
such as Fluxbox or ICWM, then try one of the AfterStep clones, such as
WindowMaker. If you find you can't live without all of the fancy desktop
extras, then give GNOME a fair chance.

hth,

 - Richard
(typing this into KMail on PWM, decorated with XFishtank, on a G4 ibook 
running Debian unstable ;-)

-- 
Richard Smedley,                                         Richard at sc.lug.org.uk
Sustainable IT Consultant,
                                 ``Software Freedom for the Voluntary Sector''